3 out of 5

Label: Potomak

Produced by: Boris Wilsdorf, Einstürzende Neubauten

When you’ve been around in the music biz for 40+ years, existing on the edge of a style your band helped to define, you can afford to stretch out sometimes, maybe drop some releases that are just pleasant, and satisfying, and not world-shattering.

While I appreciate the glowing reviews Rampen is mostly receiving, to me, this sounds like easy listening Neubauten: something casually carved from an excess of amazing output to maintain a release track record after leaving quite a big gap between the last album and the one prior to that. This is by no means a bad thing, and I appreciate the exercise; I’d also point to that “defining” sound, which is very much maintained here – Blixa’s paced to intense vocals; the industrial underpinnings, balanced with melody – if tuned to a very subdued, melodic version of it. Additionally, people are pointing to The White Album referencing cover, suggesting a comparison in relative impact to that band, and… sure, but EN has had a few minimalist covers of this form; I see it less as a claim and more in line with the style I’m describing, stripping things down to a familiar, base form. (And when you point me to some interview where the band confirms the Beatles thing, I’ll huff and stick with my version anyway.)

There are other things to discuss here before I get to the music, such as this being an album’s worth of tour improvs – not that that style of writing is unusual for the band, but structuring the whole listen around it perhaps is – and further calling it “alien pop,” regarding which I’ll just focus on the ‘pop’ part of that as being indicative of the set’s accessibility; and maybe also the fact that this was split into two discs when it likely could’ve fit onto one – there’s just a very dolled up feel to Rampen, and that tends to make it rather ephemeral once you’re through it.

A few pieces here get to clatter, closer to the end of each disc, with only album closer Gesundbrunnen going full form with that, which is admittedly a nice way to end things. Disc 2 is stronger overall I’d say, dialing in some of the looser themes of nihilism found throughout into more fleshed out thoughts and sound, taking the 74 minutes to come to conclusions both humbling (via the emotive Trilobiten) and direct; prior to this, Blixa tip-toes through repeated mantras and half-imagery, verging on some too artsy (Pestalozzi) or poetic (Planet Umbra) variants, but with hummable melodies and crisp production bringing out the sparse percussion all along the way. Disc 1’s focus on looped lyrics and electronic flourish produce – again – pleasant stuff, but it’s ultimately pretty thin and immemorable, gaining more traction as a comparison to the more aggressive tracks ending that disc, and the aforementioned more fleshed out second disc. This does mean the entire listen becomes weightier as you grasp its scope, but at the same time, I didn’t walk away from this with tunes stuck in my head as I did with Alles, while also admittedly being happy to be lost in the cycle of tunes for however long I left them running.